You Must Know Your Heifer Dust To Wade Through All The Mess

December 29, 1998|By Charley Reese of The Sentinel Staff

Well, Willie Clinton has been impeached, and the sky didn't fall. Nor will it fall when the Senate takes up impeachment. It will not fall if they boot him out of office, which, at the present moment, I doubt they will do.

These days one has to become an expert in the varieties of heifer dust. The Democrats, members of the party of slime, gave up addressing the issues. Following the orders of the sociopath-in-chief, they just attacked Republicans. The lame arguments they put forth are interesting for their lack of logic and seamy sophistry.

One was that you shouldn't impeach the president while the president has unconstitutionally committed troops to combat. Seems to me that's yet another reason to impeach him. Besides, most of the troops despise Clinton. And besides again, Democrats, unaware of the Constitution it seems, have forgotten that America's military does not involve itself in politics.

Another lame argument is that impeachment is a coup d'etat, aimed at overthrowing the election. By that logic, then all elected officials should be exempt from criminal prosecution because every time one of them gets caught committing a felony, that's overturning an election. Only a constituent of the Democratic Party would swallow that bilge.

The funniest of their arguments is that it was a partisan vote. Of course. Democrats made sure it would be. Still, five Democrats voted for impeachment, and some Republicans, on some of the articles, voted against it. That's bipartisan.

The White House-dictated strategy from day one was: Charge the Republicans with being partisan. Democrats staged a walk-out, arranged the trip to the hill by Hillary Clinton and attended the pep rally at the White House. All of that was a planned series of partisan maneuvers and photo-ops to further the propaganda campaign. Anything to distract the public from the substance of the charges.

In desperation, on some occasions some Democrats would say, ``OK, even if he did commit perjury, that doesn't rise to the level of an impeachable offense.'' Give them credit for creating a new cliche. They never say, of course, which felonies do rise to the level of an impeachable offense. Apparently their idea of the presidency is that there are some crimes the president's permitted to commit and some crimes he's not, though they don't spell out which crimes are OK and which are no-no's.

The Constitution makes no such fine distinctions. It states simply treason or other high crimes and misdemeanors. Perjury, which nets an ordinary soul hard prison time, certainly rises to and above the level of misdemeanors.

Of course, having lived through Watergate, I can tell you that no Democrat, no liberal, no newspaper ever lamented back then that ``we must not drag the country through an impeachment process.'' No, sir. They were eager to lynch Richard Nixon. And, they were enjoying every second of it.

When Nixon was in the cross-hairs, nobody complained about the country's business being held up while they dealt with impeachment. That, too, is a pitiful argument now being used by the indefensible Clinton defenders. In the first place, impeachment is the country's business. In the second, because Congress works with the speed of chilled molasses, we won't notice any difference. Congress never gets its work done on time, even when it isn't considering impeachment.

Clinton at least can be proud of his defenders - Larry Flynt, the pornographer; assorted actors, one of whom, Alec Baldwin, has called for the killing of Rep. Henry Hyde and his family (let's see if the Justice Department prosecutes Baldwin for threatening a federal official); the hypocritical feminists; the gay lobby; and the shameless Democrats. Looks to me like a conspiracy by left-wing extremists to keep the bad guy in office.